Some thoughts…

…in no particular order.

1) Am reading Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. If the closest parallel for what the UK will be like in an era of climate change and scarcity is war-time London, then I figure we should all be reading Greene, particularly Brighton Rock and The Third Man.

Why? Because an era of rationing will also be an era of gangsters and racketeers. Shortages and quotas will lead to huge global black-markets in energy, water, food and other commodities, and the rise, at the local and international levels, of new Pinkies (he’s the gangster anti-hero of Brighton Rock), who control the flows.

2) Philosophers like Plato have tended to juxtapose the body with the soul, and implied that to free the latter we have to detach ourselves from the former. A physical existence, including love-making, is supposedly opposed to a spiritual existence, according to Plato and his ilk.

I disagree. Nothing makes me feel more that our bodies are souls in motion than being in bed with a naked woman. Love-making is two souls in intimate conversation.

3) The next Google, the next Microsoft, will be an IT company that makes software for the human brain. We will be able to download applications that run directly to our neural systems, giving us real-time information feeds. Tribal identity will be defined by the operating systems that we have. Memory crashes and viruses will be fatal.

4) One of the best ideas of the Stoics was alienation – the idea that we make ourselves slaves (which is what alienation literally means, from the Latin alienus, for slave) to other people by giving a fuck what they think of us.